"This work is unlike any other, in its range of rich, conjuring imagery and its dexterity, its smart voice. Carroll-Hackett doesn’t spare us—but doesn’t save us—she draws a blueprint of power and class with her unflinching pivot: matter-of-fact and tender." —Jan Beatty

When I was a child, my parents, who very much lived lives of service, took us little kids with them when they volunteered, at migrant farm camps, at the soup kitchen, while working with refugee families or others, wherever their volunteerism took them. Today, I was blessed to work with amazing parents who are teaching their children by setting the same examples, modeling for them lives of service. The children worked with us, learning what I learned as a kid—that we are, in fact, our brothers’ keepers, and that, yes, a single act of kindness, of service, can make the world a better place.

Make art about what we teach children by our actions.

28 January 2018

Make art about feeling unsafe, about steps you take to make yourself feel safe again, about taking down your own dragons.

Daddy reciting Yeats Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild: With a faery, hand in hand. For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand…and I went out to the hazel wood,. Because a fire was in my head….

Mama reciting Kipling Though I’ve belted you and flayed you, By the livin’ Gawd that made you, You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!…as she mopped our lil trailer floors….

and Wordsworth and Coleridge and Blake…Little Lamb who made thee. Dost thou know who made thee. Gave thee life & bid thee feed…the sing-songy hopefulness of Edgar Guest, the inquiry and longing of Emily Dickinson I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too?….and Poe But we loved with a love that was more than love— /I and my Annabel Lee—

and always, always, always Frost Something there is that doesn’t love a wall….Say something to us we can learn/By heart and when alone repeat./Say something! And it says, ‘I burn.’/But say with what degree of heat….

and the one they both would use to reassure and encourage their odd and poet daughter, who even then, they understood, would have to scuff and stumble to find her own way

I shall be telling this with a sighSomewhere ages and ages hence:Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by,And that has made all the difference.

Oh and Whitman!!! Still the poet I read most frequently, still the singer of my wild child’s heart

Thank you, Mama Thank you, Daddy I owe all the poetry in my life to both of you. We had very little materially, but oh the poetry

My sweet daughter Lia, a brand new mother to an amazing baby boy Max–I call him Little Star–is beautifully maneuvering her way with Love and tenderness through the new dance of parenting, and marriage as a parent, and her own professional work.

Another sweet young mother I know, one of the daughters of my heart, is in the process of making a new home for her two little ones, having made the courageous decision to leave a marriage that wasn’t working or healthy, for her or her babies.

So I watch them in awe, as my own son used to say, “like we were just us, a crew on our own little pirate ship!”when his brother and sister and he and I were in the same place, me a mom making a home for us 🙂

How these young women astound and inspire me 🙂 how I admire them ❤

Make art about mothers, or about the daily rituals that go into making a home.